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Linux Sysadmin/DevOps Interview Questions

62 pointsby metmacabout 9 years ago

17 comments

euljiabout 9 years ago
Generally good questions.<p>However I would not ask a candidate or more specifically I would not show him the code for fork bomb. I would ask him what fork bomb is or demonstrate it on some demo VM and ask him how would he prevent himself..<p>There&#x27;s too many technologies already. I would not ask specific questions about the staff we use but instead a very generic ones.<p>Like really it&#x27;s almost impossible to be a specialist these days and you can pretend your company is full of rockstars and works on the next big thing but in fact you are just bunch of posers.<p>Nobody really knows everything to the detail. I really hated when my colleague asked new people really deep stuff about Puppet and then we have switched to Ansible and half of the team was clueless and had to learn along the way. That&#x27;s what good engineers do. They adapt. They learn the concepts and focus on delivering a good service. They do not memorize man pages.<p>When it comes to scripting &#x2F; programming do not print scripts on paper and make the candidate to describe you what is it for or find a bug &#x2F; mistake just by reviewing the paper. It&#x27;s insulting. Especially if you do not follow any conventions or your code is not idiomatic.<p>Also I would never ask a question &quot;What does the following command &#x2F; parameter do&quot;. These are not good questions. Ofc they are asked often during interviews but are just plain stupid.<p>How would you display last &#x2F; first 10 lines of a file ? How would you remove an X string from a line &#x2F; row of text ?<p>and so on...
quasseabout 9 years ago
Honestly I think this is a good list of questions to test out a search engine.<p>As far as interviewing a DevOps guy, maybe? I consider myself a decent DevOps person out of necessity, but questions like &quot;How to add a new system user without login permissions?&quot; would kind of annoy me, because that&#x27;s the exact kind of thing I can&#x27;t remember because I automated it years ago at my current job. I probably add a new user twice a week... from a Fabric script. I couldn&#x27;t tell you if it&#x27;s useradd or adduser because my workflow would be to google the exact wording of the question if I actually needed to do it manually for once.
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SFJulieabout 9 years ago
Oh my.<p>Nothing about knowing if the sysadmin knows how to find information (man, docs, info, apropos, perldoc) offline and online (advanced bash scripting guide), which shell to use to be the most portable, and where to go to be up to date regarding vulnerabilities.
derFunkabout 9 years ago
That&#x27;s a good pool of questions to choose from. How long do you think would not take an applicant to fill all of the questions?<p>My questionnaire for the same purpose (hiring) has 30 similar questions, yet including some that query soft skills.<p>E.g.: &quot;you got the following email from a customer, please write down your answer to her inquiry&quot;.<p>Or: &quot;the CFO, the CEO and the CTO are approaching you with the following different requests, how do you react to them and in which order would you process them&quot;.
jwingyabout 9 years ago
There&#x27;s some decent questions here, but also too many &quot;how to&quot; questions that most people won&#x27;t bother memorizing since they take 2 seconds to google.
KaiserProabout 9 years ago
The key thing I found in interviews (from the interviewer side) is that getting someone to sit down and write the test is not very useful.<p>Its far better to get them to talk you through it. It allows you to asses their knowledge (which can be taught) but more importantly it allows you to see <i>how</i> they work and <i>if</i> they can explain their shortcomings.<p>I want someone to say &quot;I know that x does y, but what happens when z comes along I&#x27;m not sure&quot; I can then provide a nugget of more information and see if they are able to grab onto it.<p>It shows you their ability to communicate, and will bring out more of their latent personality. You&#x27;re going to spend more time with your co-worker than your significant other, so you need to have some idea that you won&#x27;t hate them.<p>Its far more important to have someone who knows when they are out of their depth and handles it gracefully than someone who seems to have more knowledge but hacks about wildly when they fall off the deep end.
znepabout 9 years ago
This is a horrible interview question for all but a tiny handful of jobs:<p><pre><code> Is 300.168.0.123 a valid IPv4 address? </code></pre> ...but it is a great late night fun trivia question about &quot;how can adding one character to that address make it into an address accepted by many tools&quot;.
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hacooabout 9 years ago
&quot;Unpack test.tar.gz without man pages or google&quot;<p>Ha, guess I&#x27;m not the only one :)
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nailerabout 9 years ago
&gt; Write a get_prim method in python&#x2F;perl&#x2F;bash&#x2F;pseudo.<p>What does get_prim do?
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kinaiabout 9 years ago
Isn&#x27;t the biggest skill of a sysadmin to solve problems that he has not seen before? Learning all those answers to the questions wouldn&#x27;t help you much in a real life scenario.<p>Instead of asking &quot;what is&#x2F;how do you do this?&quot; it is better to give example scenarios and listen to what someone would do, to see how they approach the problem.
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djentabout 9 years ago
How can I use this as a self-placement test? I&#x27;m in college still, and I have answers to many of the general, simple Linux, and devops questions. What is expected to be known for varying levels of employment? (Intern&#x2F;junior&#x2F;normal&#x2F;senior)
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dmouratiabout 9 years ago
Here are a couple I use:<p>- How many hosts are there in a &#x2F;23 network?<p>- Estimate ping time from your workstation to your local gateway? www.google.com? Server on the east coast from the west coast? Server in Europe from the west coast?<p>- What law(s) of physics control(s) the round trip times?
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bsaulabout 9 years ago
The &quot;simple questions&quot; really reads to me like a proof of the superiority of the gui over terminal. With &quot;how to delete a directory and its content&quot; winning the award.<p>It could almost read like a wishlist for linux improvments.
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wyaeldabout 9 years ago
Does anyone know where to find a similar list for Microsoft Sysadmins?
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ex_amazon_seabout 9 years ago
Ex Amazon syseng here. Please be advised that the questions are really basic, even the &quot;hard&quot; ones and won&#x27;t get you very far in an interview in various companies.
lazyantabout 9 years ago
Thanks for the effort.<p>These type of questions are OK for a filter phone interview or entry-level Linux job imho as in they rely on &quot;what is&quot; questions (which can be memorized or replied without much experience) rather than &quot;how would you&quot; questions (the &quot;demo time&quot; at the end, that&#x27;s the good part). You want to ask scenario and troubleshooting questions rather than trivia for jobs other than basic ones. (You can certainly ask more advanced non-scenario -still relatable or practical- questions about things like system calls, interrupts, CPU scheduling etc, &quot;system internals&quot; stuff that I don&#x27;t see at all or barely in these questions. A Linux questionnaire without mentioning strace or perf hurts my heart.)<p>I can basically nit-pick, find a fault or find a better way of asking in pretty much every question.<p>The Expert section can be dropped (only one question).<p>Mysql section can be dropped, maybe replace with basic SQL section.<p>DevOps section can be dropped, we can see here how definition of DevOps is still fluid, just add Linux&#x2F;Networking&#x2F;General questions to their respective sections (also &quot;GIT&quot;, really?).<p>One reference link at the bottom doesn&#x27;t work.<p>----<p>Examples of issues with questions and how to improve them:<p>- What commands do you know that can be used to check DNS records?: instead ask how to troubleshoot DNS issues, like how to check if a name server has an entry. How does local DNS work? (as in what&#x27;s the order in which files&#x2F;servers are checked to resolve a name, where is that stored) how does DNS in general works? (as in you ask for a record to a name server and it doesn&#x27;t have it, now what). How much TTL would you set in a record and why. Why does DNS run on UDP and TCP?<p>- &quot;tac&quot;, (really? and no &quot;grep&quot; &quot;sort&quot;, &quot;uniq&quot; or &quot;sum&quot;?), rather ask how to print a field from a command like &#x27;df&#x27; or &#x27;free&#x27; or how to add column values from a text file (basically if they can slice horizontally with grep and vertically with awk &#x2F; cut and then count occurrences or sum numbers.<p>- What does &amp; disown after a command do?: rather ask when you would use &#x27;disown&#x27;, or better, inversely how to de-attach a running command from terminal<p>- What is Virtual Memory? : not sure what you want them to answer here, maybe rather ask about a server with most of its total memory used, what does Linux cache (there&#x27;s buffer and inode&#x2F;dir caching besides files but only two memory caching areas), how to find that, when does the OS write stuff in RAM to disk (what are dirty pages), how do you change that frequency, when is better to do it more&#x2F;less frequently or what&#x27;s the tradeoff etc<p>- What is swap and what is it used for?: this is more advanced but you can ask if a server can have no swap, is it possible for a server with plenty of free RAM to page (write to swap)? can you reduce&#x2F;increment tendency to swap? why would you do that, how much swap partition would you set up (OK these are a bit of tricky questions, more to gauge experience)<p>- How to search for the string &quot;my konfi is the best&quot; in files of a directory recursively? : I actually like this one<p>- How to connect to a remote server or what is SSH? : you can split in &quot;list all the possible ways you can think of so you can communicate (or send message&#x2F;file) between two servers on a network&quot; and a question about how SSH works from Linux point of view (not protocol), sshd settings (idea, not memorized params), how to set up passwordless (key-based) SSH, hardening tips, how to troubleshoot if you can&#x27;t ssh to a server (no firewall, you can telnet&#x2F;whatever), what does it mean when you get a message &quot;key has changed etc&quot;, what&#x27;s a private and public key...<p>- What is the sticky bit? : this depends on OS, I guess explaining different behaviours is good.<p>- What does the immutable bit do to a file?: this is not part of linux VFS but of particular filesystem implementations, btw no questions about what&#x27;s a filesystem, what&#x27;s a journaled one, difference between ext4 and xfs for ex. Also what about LVM?<p>- What is the difference between hardlinks and symlinks?: while a good question I&#x27;d rather ask when to use one or the other, also just to confuse, ask how to &quot;link&#x2F;map&quot; a directory in a partition that is running out of space to a directory in a new partition with plenty of space, so that it works transparently.<p>- What is MAJOR and MINOR numbers of special files?: I guess device files, rather or besides ask difference between block and character devices, about pseudo dirs in file system: &#x2F;dev &#x2F;proc &#x2F;sys , how to find hardware or process info (everything is pretty much in &#x2F;proc or &#x2F;sys , also dmesg )<p>- Describe a scenario when deleting a file, but &#x27;df&#x27; not showing the space being freed. : this is good but it can be better built into a scenario: there&#x27;s an &quot;no space left on device&quot; error, how to find biggest files&#x2F;dirs. You find it&#x27;s a huge web server access.log file, now you delete it and disk space doesn&#x27;t seem to shrink, why (the df vs du), what can you do?, can you close the open file?<p>- Instead of &quot;how does ps&#x2F;top work?&quot; ask something specific or scenario based, like how do you find if there&#x27;s a disk I&#x2F;O problem by looking at &#x27;top&#x27; (there&#x27;s at least two possible indicators). Zero questions about I&#x2F;O, or for the matter, for server utilization metrics, which ones are they, how to measure each, how to find if they reached saturation, what happens in that case for each, how to look for errors in each. If a server is using 80% CPU is that good or bad?<p>OK I got tired here.<p>If you have read until this dear reader, would you be interested in my trying to create a Docker container or Amazon image with a Linux box and have these types of scenarios set up?
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metmacabout 9 years ago
Any additional questions anyone can think of?
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